Friday, February 25, 2011

Deathwing Terminators

In celebration of the new Dark Angels FAQ, a friend of mine and I decided to do a Deathwing army on the cheap using the terminators and dreadnoughts from the Assault on Black Reach set, along with a pair of dreadnought drop pods. He buys, I paint, we sell (or use it as a teaching army for our wargaming club, failing that). All told, the army will consist of Belial, 30 terminators, two dreadnoughts and their drop pods.

Posted here are some photos of my progress painting the army so far. Enjoy!

The paint scheme for these guys follows my ultra simple, table-top quality philosophy of painting. After laying down sand on their bases, they got primed with Skeleton Bone primer from Army Painter. The green details were done in Dark Angels Green and highlighted with Snot Green. Any areas that were supposed to look like parchment or skeletons got done in Dheneb Stone with a Devlan Mud wash. A few of the optics were done with Mechrite Red and Macharius Solar Orange. Black areas are done in Chaos Black, and any metallic areas got done up in Chainmail. Bleached Bone is a perfect match for the Skeleton Bone primer, so it covers mistakes quite well. After all of the painting was done, I put some Gryphonne Sepia wash into the crevasses. The little bits of highlighting I did got done in Skull White. I had to keep it to a minimum, when I experimented with white highlights, it didn't look quite right.

The bases were done with Graveyard Earth as a base and a drybrush of Bubonic Brown. Some green flock was added after the final wash.

To break up the big areas of flat bone color, I did a bit of scroll work and free-hand detail. With the exception of the Sergeant, the right shoulder pads are all also free-handed. I laid down a coat of Adeptus Battlegrey foundation paint, and put some Chaos Black over that to do the detail work. Any mistakes got done over in Bleached Bone.

Another buddy of mine was liquidating his bits box, and in the process, I came into possession of the metal terminator librarian and metal terminator chaplain models. They're spectacular models, and I think they turned out quite well. Aside from the usual trappings of metal models, one of the issues I had was having was not getting all of the small mold vent "squiggles" off of the models before I primed them. Next time I paint a metal model, I'll have to double check that I got all of that crap off.

Frankly, I had no idea what I was doing with this guy until I got to work on him. All I knew is that he was supposed to be blue, and I went from there. The details kind of worked themselves out on their own. The whole thing is painted in my patent-pending "Foundation & Wash" technique for getting models onto the table top quickly. In addition to my usual arsenal of Foundation paints, I got to add Mordian Blue and try out some highlighting that I could never seem to get right until now. Switching to a smaller brush definitely helps.

There's nothing really special to say about Mr. Chaplain, here. He wasn't a terribly fun model to paint, considering he's pretty much just Chaos Black and Dheneb Stone.

That's about it for this update, I should have something fun posted later today.